On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 5:48 AM, Lane, Ryan Ryan.Lane@ocean.navo.navy.mil wrote:
Is MediaWiki such a special piece of software that it's impossible to build a good package?
It's "special". It isn't necessarily the fault of the distro or the package maintainer for the quality of the packages. It is our fault. Upgrading is unreliable for a number of reasons. It is definitely unreliable enough that I wouldn't trust a package to do it for me, and I can't reasonably recommend it for anyone else either.
Fair enough. Is it safe to assume that the new installer work should make proper packaging more viable?
I think it would be better if we provided the packages. If we fix our upgrade issues, I'll be more than happy to write rpms and debs.
I think this would be fantastic, so defining what bar we need to clear would be seems like a worthwhile exercise. Even if distro makers still go off and create their own derivatives, having a good reference implementation would be wonderful.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a project that doesn't complain about what packagers do (assuming they don't do their own packaging, and even then...)
Rob